For the past year, I have told anyone who has asked me about social media that Twitter is messy. If you are in a relationship with Twitter, you know what I mean.
There are stalkers on Twitter. You know the kind. They follow you but you have no idea why. You read their profile (if they’ve bothered to create anything beyond a username) and you still don’t know why they are following you. And, I find bios with “I follow back” off-putting. People who write that in their profile mean that if you follow them and they’ll follow you even if they have no idea why. What is that about?
Well, at least I can block the stalkers and the follow-backers….and anyone else I want to. Maybe Twitter uses the block feature to find spammers and deactivate their accounts. I’ll hold on to that thought. It’s such a nice one.
It is getting harder to find the people you know on Twitter.
One year ago, you could import contacts from Gmail and Yahoo. Not anymore. Now there’s just AOL and Outlook/Hotmail. No disrespect—that’s what my son says when something kind of mean is coming—but do people who are on AOL even know what Twitter is? Here’s the odd thing about searching for people on Twitter: if I want to look up a friend, like my friend John Smith, who’s email address I know and who’s name is too common, it’s impossible to find him unless I have AOL or Outlook. How frustrating!
There is one feature I LOVE on Twitter. It’s the mute function. Sometimes I just have to mute someone I’m following. Too much noise in my feed. I know it’s crazy: why not just stop following them? Well, sometimes you have to follow people who are following you so that the people they follow will know you’re following them. Are you following me? I told you Twitter is messy. Twitter relationships are messy too.
Search is also messy on Twitter. I have found content and people on Twitter through a Google search that I could not find on the Twitter site. So sometimes you have to leave Twitter to find what you need on Twitter. Messy!
And, on a desktop, surely I am not the only person who logs out of Twitter to log in as a different user with a different account. (Perhaps I’m the only one who still uses a desktop?) For many of reasons, individuals manage multiple Facebook pages from a single login. Facebook makes it easy. And, they get tons of information from allowing it. I wonder if it counts as multiple users. Or single users with multiple pageviews, time spent on the site, etc. All the things advertisers want to see regarding an engaged audience. Why, oh why, can’t Twitter allow me to manage multiple users/accounts/pages/whatever?
Because Twitter is messy.
But all is not lost. Everything in this message can be mitigated. Twitter knows it but they are not starting from scratch. They first have to undo the damage left by the (mostly product) folks that Mr. Dorsey just got rid of. Hopefully they do so before we all leave for good.